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How-To Geek

If you are like me, you probably have dozens of windows open at any given point, so if you want to tile just a couple of windows you have to minimize everything and then show two of the windows, and then tile them… so how do we just quickly select two taskbar buttons together?

There’s a simple trick that’s been built into Windows forever… hold down the Ctrl key while selecting taskbar buttons and you can select more than one at a time. The benefit is that you don’t have to minimize any other windows in order to tile them (or close them)

Stupid Geek Trick Illustrated

Hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on a taskbar button, and then while still holding down the Ctrl key, click on another taskbar button. You’ll notice that they are both selected. (Note that you can click on a button again to deselect it.)

Now that they are both selected, you can right-click on one of the buttons and choose to cascade, stack or show the windows side by side.

I don’t find cascading or stacking very useful, but side-by-side is something I use quite often.

This can be extremely useful when you are trying to look at two windows at once, especially when you’ve got a ton of windows open but only want to tile two of them.

Note: This should work fine in Windows XP even though the screenshots are from Vista.

Great trick, but on my vista home premium sp1 using 2 windows, the windows have a big gap between them wasting a lot of space. Any idea why, or how to solve so the space is used more efficiently when doing side by side?

I wish you a happy day and once again I cannot let a day go by without reading what “my” Geek has to say. I have learned so much more about computers because of you than I ever could have done otherwise. Thanks for being there.

AHAHah omg this is so awesome. I’ve done the manual resizing windows thing for SO MANY TIMES when doing research with browser and taking notes with word etc. hahah what a waste of my past time. At least I know this now! Thanks!

Yeah – ditto @ windows 7 fail. Why remove something so useful ?! Still it is only Beta so with suffucient winge power it could change. I suppose there’ll eventually be a registry hack to fix this oversight…

They didn’t remove it in Windows 7! I was playing around with it for a bit. If you have multiple windows opened, hold down ctrl + shift, then right click on the taskbar program icon (the one that you have the multiwindows open). It’ll give you the same options as noted above for Vista.

This is something that has been in windows at lease since 2000. If you are like me, I constantly have a lot of windows open and have my task bar on the right side of my screen so I can read the titles. When I moved to Windows 7, I noticed by default, Windows combines windows of the same program. I have chosen not to combine the windows so I can read the titles. If you go this route, what Korbam suggested does not work. Nor can you select windows of different applications.

This is a BIG pain in my books. If anyone has a solution, please post it for the rest of us!

The only new feature I like along similar lines is the ability to hold shift and left click to open a new instance.

GEEK TRIVIA

DID YOU KNOW?

Salmonella, the bacteria responsible for untold cases of food poisoning around the world every year, is named after Daniel Elmer Salmon (the leader of the Veterinary Division of the United States Department of Agriculture lab in which the bacteria was first discovered in 1885).